


Venom's Christmas Carol

by LuciferDreaming



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Venom (Comics), Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: M/M, Rape/Non-con Elements, Tentacle Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 09:50:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 23
Words: 20,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17201273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LuciferDreaming/pseuds/LuciferDreaming
Summary: It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EbonytoIvory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EbonytoIvory/gifts).



**Chapter 1**

J. Jonah Jameson was dead. Eddie Brock was sure of this fact. It had been seven years since Jameson had left his lofty position as publisher of the _Daily Bugle_ to go and investigate the strange thing that had fallen from the sky. The explosion had rocked the city and set the surrounding forest on fire. Jameson had died in that fire. Nothing had been discovered once the flames had been put out.

With Jameson dead, Brock had taken full advantage of the loss. His own paper, _The Globe_ , had taken over the competition. Brock had climbed his way up the ladder from reporter to publisher in those seven years. The only newspaper in the city was _his_ now. Brock had honored the dead Jameson by calling his paper the Bugle. There was no friendliness in this act. It was a matter of politics, just as his attendance of Jameson’s funeral had been a matter of politics.

He didn’t feel much for the death of his ‘friend’ and competitor. These things were just expected of a certain class of men—a class of men that he had worked very hard to be a part of. He didn’t blame Jonah, actually, for chasing the thrill of the dangerous work of a good reporter. It was in the blood. Brock understood that better than most. Still, it was stupid. There were underlings for such work.

Eddie Brock was as cheap and mean as a man could be. He had abandoned his scruples a long time ago. No one loved him and nearly everyone feared him. No one greeted Mr. Brock on the blistery winter streets as he made his way to his place of employment. No chilled beggar dared to ask him for spare change. He was young to be as rich as he was. He was good-looking enough to make the ladies swoon, but discontentment radiated off him in a cold titan wave that chilled any heart foolish enough to want to beat for him.

Popular consensus about that city had it that Eddie Brock was a miser—both monetarily and emotionally—all take and no give. People left him alone lest they end up like Jameson, missing and presumed dead, with a family new to the poorhouse and Brock had put them there.

Brock did not care what other people felt about him most of the time. If pressed, though, he found a great pleasure in being disliked and disliking others. People were lay bouts, beggars and thieves. This was another thing he knew better than anyone else. What did he care for their kind greetings and attentions? Life was hard and life was cruel and he had forged himself harder and crueler than anyone else in order to Master the damned thing. It was the only sensible thing to do with all this misery and suffering.

It was a cold and bitter Christmas Eve that had Eddie walking into the Bugle. The outer room was cold and he hurried out of frock coat and top hat in order to get into this warmer, more personal, space. Of his several employees, the only he took notice of in passing was Peter Parker. Begrudgingly, he thought that Parker was a decent reporter.

“Good morning, Mr. Brock,” Parker said, the breath coming out of his mouth in a thin mist in the chill air. “It’s cold, but beautiful out there this fine Christmas Eve, isn’t it?”

“Hum- _fucking_ -bug,” Brock breathed under his breath in passing. He entered his office and stoked the fire there, already started by Parker. His own little chamber radiated a certain welcome warmth. Still, he left the door open so that he could monitor Parker and make sure that he was working.

“Merry Christmas, Uncle!” a voice called suddenly with irritating cheer and familiarity. The voice belonged to his nephew, Philip.

“Humbug,” Brock thought and said as his eighteen-year-old nephew swept into his office. Philip was small and fair and as irritating to look at as he was to be around. Blue eyes locked on Brock assessing him in a way that heightened the irritation he felt at this teenaged person’s presence.

“You don’t mean that, dear Uncle,” Philip said with a smile.

“I do,” Brock assured him. “You have no right to be merry, Philip. You’re poor.”

The smile faltered a little. “And you have no right to be a dick. You’re rich.”

“Rich in a world of poor fools,” Brock said with a sigh, “Poor fools constantly pretending that they aren’t poor and they aren’t fools. It’s bothersome, Philip. So tell me what you want so you can take your poor foolishness and your broke ass Merry Christmas and go away.”

“Uncle,” Philip said in distress.

“ _Nephew_ ,” Brock said, coldly. “There were six murders in this Merry City last night. Everyone doesn’t keep Christmas the same as you, obviously. I’ll do it my way and you’ll do it yours and the murderers will do it _their_ way. I have work to do. Are we done?”

Behind his nephew, Brock spotted Parker turned all the way around and staring into his office. He scowled at the younger male and Peter flinched and got back to work. Brock had to suppress a smile. If only his nephew was as easy to control as that.

“Don’t be angry, Uncle,” Philip said, softly. “It’s my wife, you see.”

Brock snorted. “You’re too young to have a wife and too damn poor.”

“And, yet, she exists. And she is beautiful. And she has some friends, lovely ladies, who would be honored at your presence at dinner this Christmas. They speak well of you, you see, in whispered tones when you’re not around. My Sophia has asked me to ask you again to come to our home for Christmas dinner--”

Brock scoffed. “No, thank you.”

“But Uncle, you’re only thirty-three and act like an old man. You are tall and dark and handsome but for that ugly personality of yours—“

“Bah,” Brock scoffed, having had enough. “Get out.”

“But, why?” Philip asked. “Just tell me why and I will go.”

Brock saw only the obstinate child in the young man before him. He had been dismissed. He should have already evaporated.

“Why did you get married, _child_?”

Blue eyes widened, confused, “Because I love her, of course.”

Brock laughed. The sound was a cruel bark. It filled the room for several seconds and both his nephew and his employee flinched, simultaneously upon hearing the sound. “There is no such thing as love, you stupid, _poor_ , boy. Good afternoon to you.”

His nephew left without another word. Scrooge watched him stop at his employee’s desk. There, the two men exchanged greeting and Christmas well-wishes. It was one of the most ridiculous things he’d ever seen—two dirt poor people discussing the exchange of gifts with no money, and being ‘merry’ about finding themselves a year older and still dirt poor.

It didn’t make sense to Eddie Brock. They lacked the drive that he had, obviously. And became distracted by ideas like ‘love’ and ‘Christmas’. Fools, all of them.

“ _Humbug_.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

His employee had walked his nephew out, and Brock actually considered docking the bastard a few cents pay. The thought was compounded by the fact that Peter had let some other people in as well—two of them, one fat, and one thin. They carried myriad books and papers in their hands and entered his office bowing and scraping like beggars.

“Mr. Brock…” the fat man began.

“…Has work to do,” Brock finished for him.

“Of course, of course,” the thin man said quickly. “We won’t take much of your time, good sir. It’s just that the Bugle made a regular contribution to our cause, and we have received no such contribution these past seven years. We understand that Mr. Jameson was not a kind man and that he contributed to our cause with a sort of social expectancy, but we really depended on the money to aid the poor. Without the Bugle’s contribution since the tragic fire that claimed Mr. Jameson’s life, we’ve had to turn away hungry families...”

“Jameson died this very night seven years ago,” Brock said, coldly. “Did your little organization think that you would catch me weak for an old friend and I’d turn out my pockets to the starving masses? I’ve stated my case seven times before; the poor should work hard and feed themselves. I will give nothing!”

The men looked at one another and then clutched their papers to the chests and left the office. Feeling satisfied with himself, Brock got to the important business of work. He sorted the murders before him, each grislier than the last. Three of the bodies were missing their heads. The murderer didn’t seem to care if the victim was a man or a woman. The kills were savage and messy. They were the kind of kills that a hunting animal might make in order to… _eat_.

He shook his head. No one, thus far, had made any kind of connection between the murders. The victims came from all social standings. The kills looked random, but there was deliberateness to the mess made of each victim. There were body parts missing. The arms and legs of several of the bodies looked like they’d been torn off at the sockets by something impossibly strong.

This kind of darkened the city’s precious Christmas. The police were loathe to say that this was the work of one killer. No one man could be capable of this kind of wanton destruction of another human being without raising a ruckus. And, yet, Brock thought it was one killer, even though it didn’t make any sense, even though it was an impossible, ridiculous thought. He wouldn’t print it, but he thought it.

He worked through the day printing today’s stories and getting the leads to the stories of tomorrow. Finally, it was time to close the office. He watched Parker gather his coat and prepare to leave. The brown-haired young man practically shook with Christmas excitement.

Brock called out to him. “You expect tomorrow off, no doubt?”

Parker froze. “I would like it, yes.”

“Your crime scene photos weren’t bad,” Brock said, thoughtfully.

Parker spun around. “Thank you, sir!”

His face reflected a joy for being praised that was disgusting to look at. It never failed to amaze Brock that even though Parker wasn’t rich, he still found a way to be happy—about anything. His breath was still misting from the chill of the chamber he was standing in. His shoulders were shaking with the cold.

“They weren’t good either,” Brock said. “Your day off is going to cost me money. I don’t like things or people that cost me money, Parker.”

“Yes, sir,” Parker said, his smile fading just a little. “But it’s Christmas, sir. If you need me to come in I will, but I’d like to spend the day with my family if it is at all possible, if it’s convenient, sir.”

“It most certainly is not convenient, Parker! Paying you to take a day off is of no one’s convenience.”

“It’s Christmas, sir,” Parker reminded him again. “It’s only once a year.”

“Once a year, on the twenty-fifth of December, you pick my pocket like anybody’s damn thief,” Brock said. “But you only do it once a year. And you’re pretty stand-up the rest of the year, so I’ll allow it. Make sure you’re early the next morning, do you hear?”

“Yes, sir,” Parker said.  “Extra early the next day. You have my word. Merry-Merry Christmas, Mr. Brock.”

Brock watched him go, and then got his things together. He took his notes on the murderer with him. He had made a habit of putting the unfolding mystery together like a puzzle at night to see what his ancient reporter skills could find. He locked the doors behind him and went out into the blistery night with a growl of “humbug on that Christmas shit.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

He ate dinner, alone, at a fine tavern. They were used to him and served him with a servile grace that he had come to expect from people. He went through his notes while he ate and wondered why his mind had made the cult of killers that had to be responsible for these abominable murders into a singular monster—big, predatory, dangerous and utterly inhuman in its strengths and behaviors.

_Nothing like that could possibly exist_ , he assured himself. And, yet, he couldn’t shake the thought that there was this singular beast, roaming the city, cloaked in shadows, and _eating_ people. Darkness had fallen across the cold city by the time he’d finished his meal, and he amused himself by peeking into every shadow searching for the carnivorous thing that might be lurking there. He lived in a small house that had once belonged to J. Jonah Jameson. Even this he had taken from his competitor. Once rather beautiful, it was gloomy now.

As he approached the front door, he noticed something very odd about his doorknocker. Normally, the bronzed face of a mighty lion roaring at the world, the knocker wept strange black goo from the fierce eyes of the beast. Inky tears slid down the lion’s face, and those tears quivered and danced in an unnatural way—lengthening and then recoiling as if _impossibly_ sentient.

As Brock stared at this phenomenon, the inky goo slid up and into the bronze eyes of the creature and the knocker was just a knocker again. Startled, Brock told himself that this is what happens when you tell yourself ridiculous terror tales in the dark. He grabbed hold of the doorknob and pushed into the quiet gloom of his house.

Inside was very dark, and he lit a candle which only gave the smallest bit of light as he made his way to his bedrooms. He had never been afraid of the dark, and, despite what had happened with the door knocker, he wasn’t about to start being afraid. He had simply imagined whatever that was. As a person that told stories for a living, he had just happened to tell himself a particularly terrible one. Everything was right with his world. Everything was as it should be.

He made a quick scan of his bedroom in the interest of assuring himself that fantasies, even the dark ones, were just that—fantasies. When he was done searching for the nothing that he was sure was there, he closed his bedroom door and double locked it. While this was an unusual action, it didn’t mean he was afraid.

Suddenly, something stirred in the dark coals of Brock’s unlit fireplace. The darkness in that shadowy pit _moved_ …it _slithered_.

He recoiled. “Humbug!” he shouted and stood his ground. The shadows within the fireplace stopped their vile, unnatural movement. When the movements did not resume, he paced a little, nervous. Eventually, he sat down in the lavish, though worn, chair before the fireplace. There was a bell hanging near the fireplace, the kind of bell one would use to summon a servant if he’d had any use for such a useless creature. He never noticed the bell normally, but, as he watched it from where it hung near the ceiling, the bell rang.

It swung softly, ever so softly on its wisp of a string. Its summoning tinkle echoed in the chamber. He stared at the impossibility of it, noting that its string was black. Had it always been black? He couldn’t remember. Why couldn’t he remember? It was _his_ house. He should know the color of the things that decorated it. It was a stupid, useless bell to summon a stupid useless servant—but it was his bell and he should know about it.

A dark tendril of fear stirred in his breast, took root in his heart, and froze him to the seat. The ringing of this bell was matched to the ringing of other bells in his house, bells put in place long before he’d come into possession of the place—Jameson’s bells. The bells stopped abruptly and a new and far more terrifying sound took their place. It was a low dragging sound coming up from the cellar, up and toward him. _A ghost_ , he thought, in the same macabre way that he’d envisioned a monster instead of a man in the city killings. _Ghosts drag chains and dwell in cellars._

Below, he heard the cellar door fly open hard enough to dent the wall. The sound was a heavy and resounding boom that echoed throughout the entire house, and then the dragging noise got much louder from below, louder and closer by the second…straight toward him.

“Humbug!” Brock snarled. “I don’t believe this bullshit! Still I don’t believe it!”


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

He screamed in the moment that the heavy, locked, door to his bedroom flew open. He watched the wall crack and the wood rend beneath the power of the assault. The metal from the locks exploded flying across the room, mangled. There, before him, stood the ghost of J. Jonah Jameson. There was a heavy chain around Jameson’s waist. Cashboxes, ledgers, keys and other heavy objects decorated the chain like macabre charms.

“J-Jameson,” Brock croaked. “What do you want with me?”

“ _Much_!” Jameson breathed. It was not his voice. This voice was darker and deeper than Jameson’s had ever been in life. This was the dark, inhuman voice of a demon.

The ghost raised a terrible cry then, the vicious snarl of a hunting animal. It shook its terrible chains. The combined sounds were so terrifying that Brock clutched the arms of the chair with white knuckled intensity to keep himself from fainting.

“Mercy!” he cried and added his voice to the terrible din. “Spirit, why do you trouble me?”

“ _Do you believe in me_?” that terrible, unnatural voice asked.

Brock stood on legs that seemed to be comprised of warm butter instead of meat and bone. “How can I not? I’m looking at you plainly. But why are you, a spirit, walking the earth and why are you troubling me?”

Jameson grinned, and his grin was just a little too long for his face. “ _If I told you that it was a requirement of all spirits to walk amongst his fellow men after his death. He is to travel far and wide to observe the unhappiness that he created while he was alive, would you believe that, Eddie_?”

Being called Eddie made Brock flinch. No one ever called him that—especially Jameson. They had had an odd relationship, he and this ghost. They had been friends on paper. They associated, having been driven by the same types of things, money and power. But they had been competitors for that very money and power. And men like them didn’t really believe in friends. Jameson would have called him Brock in life.

“ _Woe is me!_ ” Jameson wailed. It shook its chains and wrung its hands in despair. “ _Woe, Eddie, woe unto me_!”

“Y-you are ch-chained,” Brock whispered, shakily. “Tell me…Tell me why.”

“ _I grew these chains the moment that I first saw you in this one’s mind, Eddie,”_ Jameson said. His voice was different somehow. Lower. Very intense.

Brock trembled more and more. He had a very materialistic, realistic, world view and this apparition was warping it—making room for itself as something impossibly _real_.

“ _You wear these chains, Eddie, and so does this one. You cannot see yours, but I have made his real for you. The chains you wear are fuller, heavier and longer than his by seven years. Yours is an enormous chain, Eddie_!”

Brock glanced around him, looking at the floor, looking at himself, half expecting to see himself weighted down the way that the ghost of Jameson was. Part of him expected fifty or sixty feet of enormous chain locked around his waist and throat, shackled to his ankles and wrists. He could almost feel the weight of it, constricting his movements, dragging him down, choking him. But none of that was real. He saw nothing. He was not chained.

He couldn’t quite manage relief, staring at the terrible apparition, and settled on understanding instead, “John,” he said, using the man’s first name for the first time ever. “John Jameson, tell me more.”

“ _He cannot rest. His thoughts are of money only. There is no love in him, no compassion, and no kindness. This is a cold man. A cruel man. And in his mind the only one colder than he is you, Eddie...”_

Jameson drifted closer and Brock was rooted to the floor as it came. Jameson had always been a little shorter than Brock’s own six-foot-three height, but somehow, this apparition seemed to tower over him. It reached out and ran cold fingers through his hair. “ _Chocolate_ ,” it leaned in and whispered, too close. “ _I love chocolate, Eddie.”_

Brock recoiled. Its breath smelled of carrion. The thing pressed in closer. Brock’s legs collided with the heavy chair. He nearly fell back into it, but managed to remain standing as Jameson pressed into him. “ _Pretty Eddie, so cold. Is he right then? Are you worse than this? He has been entertaining these past seven years, but I want_ you.”

Brock was a marble statue of utter confusion. His mind was having problems processing the things that Jameson’s ghost was saying. He was riveted and, yet, there was some kind of important disconnection. His mind searched for that disconnect as Jameson’s lips brushed his. There was warmth beneath the chill of that mouth. _Heat_ —a heat that didn’t really mesh with being a cold, dead, ghost. He noted that as he found the disconnect that bothered him so much. Jameson was talking of himself as if he were some ‘other’.

“You were always a good businessman, John,” Brock faltered. “I always admired you, strove to be like you.” _Overtake you._

“ _Business_ ,” Jameson said, darkly, looking around the gloomy little chamber with some distaste. _“…is a lonely proposition, Eddie. With Jameson, it was always he and I. But--_ ”

It was looking at him again, and Eddie could no longer pretend that the thing he was looking at was Jameson. He didn’t know what was going on, but the _otherness_ of this thing was too real to ignore anymore. It wasn’t a spirit at all. It was something else entirely—something far worse than a supernatural shadow. He trembled in the face of it, only still standing because he didn’t dare move, even to collapse.

“ _But…_ ” it continued, “ _I think I could be a ‘we’ with you. And isn’t that all any of us ever want? To be a we with someone? Isn’t that the real business of the universe? Of all the universes_?”

The scent of its carrion breath consumed him, and Brock shook.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

 

“ _I’ve come for you, Eddie. I’ve come to find out if we can be a we. Or if I’ll leave you wrapped in your terrible chains_ ,” the ‘ghost’ continued. “ _Three chances, Eddie, three trials to win my love_.”

Brock could feel the blood draining from his face. _Love_? “I’d rather not,” he said.

“ _Without the trials_ ,” said the ghost, “ _you cannot hope to avoid the path that this one would have trod had he not come to investigate the thing that fell from the sky seven years ago. Expect the first trials tomorrow, when the bell tolls one_.”

“No,” Brock said. His mind was working overtime in an effort to find a way out of whatever madness this was. A thousand lies floated through his head. He considered begging. He couldn’t quite get it all together in his head, this talk of love and chains. He did understand, now, that this all had something to do with Jameson investigating the thing that had fallen from the sky seven years ago. But it wasn’t a complete understanding, and he really liked understanding. It was hard to deal with a problem that one didn’t understand. And he did not understand _much_ of this. Not enough to save himself anyway. “I don’t want this, J-Jameson. I don’t want--”

“ _I want_ ,” Jameson breathed, too close. His eyes turned totally black—the white obliterated in a single inky swirl. “ _It took me seven long years to dare and come and find you, Eddie, because_ I want _and what I want might just kill you_. I suppose we should find that out now, shouldn’t we _? No trials if you die, Eddie, but no chains either, which seems fair enough to me_. _This Jameson is a miserable motherfucker. And you’re better than that. Death is better than that_.”

Jameson smiled that terrible too long smile again, only this time the smile didn’t stop. It just kept right on going. The skin of his face split. Jagged, meat-rending jaws exploded from that terrible maw. In an apogee of horror, Brock fell back into the chair, and then sought to scramble over it… _to get away_. Liquid dark tendrils, what seemed to be millions of them, lay on him from behind, and they were strong and they held him there even as he sought to vault over the chair and put some space, any space, between him and the nightmare that had invaded his bedroom.

Those tendrils snatched away bits of his clothing. One of them rolled over his mouth—thick and hot and wet—to keep him from screaming. The sound of the ripping of his clothing filled the chamber, along with the sounds of his desperate struggles. The tendrils dragged him back toward the monster. They jerked him up, several feet into the air and shook him a little, as his clothing was peeled off him strip by strip. He kicked and he struggled as inky tendrils locked around his wrists and ankles, and he was flipped around to face the thing and then dragged toward it.

It was a writhing mass of inky blackness standing there draped around the form of J. Jonah Jameson. The blackness erupted, it seemed, from every orifice. It leaked from Jameson’s eyeballs and spurted from his mouth in a thick black gout. Jameson’s eyes were wide and horrified within that terrible blackness—wide and horrified and human.

Brock didn’t have time to think about that though. He was naked and writhing in the grips of the creature that had both of them. He was jerked toward Jameson and the darkness again obliterated Jameson’s face. Instead he stared into a terrible visage of near absolute darkness. Strange white eyes—too big, too inhuman—stared directly into his. A long, snake-like tongue slid out of the gulfing, jagged-toothed mouth, and licked his face like he was a steak and the thing that had him was a starving dog.

The tendril over his mouth moved and that terrible tongue slid within him as he tried to scream his horror to the entire world. It filled his mouth and the taste and feel was slick and hot and… _strange_. It pulsed hotly inside of him, the throbbing hot and heavy. He choked on it as it slid deeper down his throat. Another tendril slid around his dick, locking hard at the base and pulsing there. A tendril jerked his balls. Another slapped his ass. Yet another slid between his ass crack and bumped against his asshole.

The tongue in his mouth slid out a little and then pressed in again—harder, deeper. Darkness slid into the slit in the tip of his dick. It was painful, but, mortifyingly, it made his dick rock hard almost instantly.

“ _So good, Eddie_ ,” something whispered deep inside his mind, “ _so good_.”

The shock of having that voice deep inside him intensified his panicked struggles but he couldn’t scream his terror with his mouth full. His heart was beating at heart attack speed. His world tilted, grayed around the edges, as his body tried to absorb all the sensations rocketing through him at once. And then the tendril at his ass pressed through the muscle of his anus and filled him hard and fast and completely.

_Oh God, Oh God, Oh God_ , Eddie thought.

“ _God_?” the voice chuckled darkly. “ _No, Eddie._ We… _are Venom_.”

The tendril withdrew and then plunged into him again. His cry was nothing more than a yawning moan. It came from deep inside him and echoed all through him. His world grayed some more. Deep inside him, the living darkness bounced off of his prostate and the world seemed to explode with the contact.

_Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me_ , his mind shrieked for this completely alien type of touch.

Cum flooded his dick in a hot lava wave that was blocked off by the darkness inside that hard, throbbing flesh. The pressure was insane. He was driven insane.

The thing fucked his ass. It fucked his mouth. It battered his balls. It flowed into his ears. It pinched his nipples. It spanked his ass. It _consumed_ him. And it was all too much. With a dismayed whimper, Brock passed out.

Words followed him into the darkness. “ _You’re alive. You are as delicious as I thought you would be. And you are mine, Eddie. Mine_.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

 

Brock dreamed. He dreamed that he was standing at his bedroom window, looking out upon the familiar landscape of the city beyond it. The air above the many rooftops was filled with phantoms. They wandered there, restless and moaning. Every last one of them wore chains like Jameson’s. Slowly, they faded away as he spiraled toward wakefulness. He could feel the aches and pains of his battered body.

He sat up and found himself on the floor of his bedroom. He was naked, ravished, and everything ached. The door to his bedroom hung, haphazard, on what was left of the hinges. Jameson was gone. He was alone.

A titan wave of absolute relief flooded him. Simultaneously, his mind flooded with his last thoughts before he passed out. Fuck me, he had thought. And then, fuck me, and fuck me again. He was horrified with himself. What the hell had happened to him?

And where had the thing gone that had done it?

His clothing lay in tatters on the floor. There was a dark and greasy pool directly in front of him and a trail leading from it and out the door of the bedroom like something had been dragged away from that place. He considered following that trail, but he didn’t think he wanted to find what lay at the end of it.

Slowly, tenderly, he climbed to his feet. There were bruises on the parts of his body that he could see. He was black and blue and red and raw all over. He stung and hurt and ached everywhere. “What happened to me?” he breathed to the quiet room.

He received no answer but the ticking his bedroom clock. He glanced at the mahogany timepiece. There was less than an hour until one. He considered running but had nowhere to run to, and no friend to take him in. The police would not believe him. And what would he tell them anyway? That he had been _assaulted_ by some _thing_ in his own bedroom. Some impossible thing that had come to him wearing the skin of his friend?

He wavered on his feet. He was so tired he could barely think, but he resolved himself to stay awake until the appointed moment.

Time seemed to move incredibly slowly. Every second felt like an hour. Finally, the bell tolled. It was one.

“ _Eddie_ ,” the all-too-familiar, hellish, voice whispered.

He spun around and stumbled backward, desperately searching the room for the nightmare. He was met with only the familiar landscape, slightly disturbed, and the shadows—the dark, _dark_ , shadows. The shadows seemed to writhe, dark and alive. First one and the other.

“Rapist!” Brock hissed at the shadows.

“ _But you_ asked me to fuck you, Eddie. You asked me more than once.”

Mortification flooded him, stirred anger. He blushed there in the gloomy darkness of his bedchamber and the heat of it spread through him in an embarrassing wave. “Is it time for my first trial, infernal thing?” he snapped in reaction.

Darkness stirred on his flesh, seeped out of his pores in an inky flood that stretched out from his shoulder and formed something like a head. Those strange white eyes flowered in that dark mass, and that terrible toothy gaping maw. “ _Yes_.”

_It was inside of me_ , Brock thought, the same way it was inside Jameson. It was a horrible thought, but it had been a strange and horrible night. “What did you do with John?” he asked the thing.

“ _We disposed of him. We did not eat him if that is what you’re worried about. We took his corpse several blocks away and left him to be found by your police force_.”

Eddie considered all of that—the fact that this thing said it ate people and his paper had been flooded recently with murder after murder, savage headless ones. He wasn’t particularly sad that Jameson was dead but he was intensely aware of that last moment of horrified eye contact between them. Jameson had been alive when the thing…when Venom…had been inside of him. Jameson was dead now. Did separation from the creature cause death?

He wobbled on his feet, the infusion of horror too great. He regretted his bold words about getting on with the first trial. Had Jameson completed this thing’s trials only to be discarded in a dirty alley after serving as its vehicle for seven long years?

It wavered in front of him, the disembodied, liquid-dark head wavering snake-like, the alien white eyes watching him intently. The terrible tongue lolled between a gate of treacherous jagged teeth.

“What are you?” he asked, softly.

“ _I am an organic, amorphous, multicellular extraterrestrial symbiote called a Klyntar. I bond with a host, creating a symbiotic bond through which a single entity is created. We are Venom. There were others. They died in the crash. I was alone_.”

“Okay,” Brock said, softly, pretending like he had understood any of that. “What are you going to do to me, Venom?”

Venom cocked its dark head to the side. Those white eyes glowed with sudden lechery. “ _Whatever you want, Eddie. I can give you whatever you want, however you want it, whenever you want it._ ”

Brock felt hypnotized by those white, wicked lamplights. He thought, for a moment, that he could see stars and planets spinning around in them. A distant vista of thin, jagged mountains that rose in spheres to the seventeen ringed moons in a gunmetal sky—a world impossibly different from his.

“ _Come inside with me, Eddie_ ,” Venom said. “ _That is where the trials are_.”

Brock didn’t have time to think about it. The world changed.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7**

 

The bedroom, the city itself, had vanished. He was in the middle of an open country road. The scenery was instantly familiar. “I was bred in this place,” Brock said, astounded. “I was a boy here.”

He was staring across the open field in front of him at the towering spires of the school in the near distance. It was an impossibly expensive school and had cost his family an incredible sum of money for him to attend. The sudden reminder of his boyhood caused his lip to tremble.

The thing stood beside him now. It was seven-foot-six-inches of bulky muscle and inky liquid-black flesh. Its terrible face gazed upon the school with him. And when Brock started walking toward that place, the creature followed.

He recognized every gate and post and tree. In the distance, beyond the school, there was a market-town, and a bridge, a church, and a winding river. Winter lay over all of it like a white-velvet cloak.

Happy boys rode shaggy ponies through the snowy fields. Other boys rode in carts driven by farmers. Everyone was in good spirits, shouting and laughing—their joy the symphony that set a mood of general merriment to the scene.

Brock could not smile with them. He never could.

“ _This is the past, Eddie_ ,” Venom said, “ _You should leave it here_.”

“Said the one who brought me here,” Brock replied darkly.

His body still ached with Venom’s _tender_ ministrations. He still shook with being touched like that. And here it was offering him advice. He walked away from it, hurrying up the road, wondering why he didn’t feel cold, because he was still quite naked, wondering why he wasn’t being stared at by the people whom he passed along the way.

“ _These are only shadows. They have no consciousness of us_ ,” Venom said, as if he’d read his mind.

Brock could name every person that he saw. And he was glad to see them because it had been a very long time since he had thought of any of them. His heart wept as he moved amongst them. He listened to their greetings of Merry Christmas and he recalled a time when he had been excited for the season, when he’d felt something other than contempt for it.

“ _Everyone is leaving, Eddie_ ,” Venom said, “ _but the school is not quite deserted, is it? There is one child left, abandoned by his friends. He is there still_.”

Brock knew it, and he wanted to cry about it. Unfortunately, a young man had wandered to close to the hulking monstrosity that followed him. The young man passed Brock merrily enough, and a second later screamed. Brock heard the horrific sound of the crunching of bone and flesh. He heard blood-spatter, and the rip of rending teeth.

He turned around to watch Venom’s jagged jaws clip off the head of the young man. The body jittered and danced. Blood darkened the whiteness of the snow. Brock shrieked because Bobby Larimore had been a pretty nice kid.

“ _Disgusting! Memories taste bad, Eddie_ ,” Venom said, glaring at him like it was _his_ fault. “ _Not like the real thing at all_.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8**

Watching Venom bite the head off of the memory of Bobby Larimore had taught Brock something that he thought he might be able to use later—if he survived whatever this was. Venom was the City’s killer.

They left the road and came to a towering mansion of dull, red brick. Once upon a time, it had been a beautiful house, but looking at it now, with the eyes of an adult, Brock saw that it was a house of broken fortune. His child’s mind had made it far greater than it was. Now, he saw that the spacious offices were little used, the walls damp and mossy, the windows broken here and there, the surrounding gate rusted and decayed. Chickens and other barn animals milled about looking thin. There were holes in the walls of the stables. Inside the school, the rooms were poorly furnished, cold and empty.

Venom loped through the halls, running along the walls and ceiling, powerful muscles eating up the space, powerful hands and feet leaving holes in the plaster as he went. Brock followed him, touching things now and then that he had touched when he’d been a child, running his fingers along the broken wood and shattered glass that he had thought was go great and he had been so grateful for.

_“An education_ ,” his father had told him, “ _is priceless. It is the difference between rich and poor Edward. You must always remember to be grateful for all I have done for you.”_

And he had been grateful when he’d been a child. Grateful and alone.

Venom stopped over a door at the back of the immense house. It opened before them, and Brock passed within barely mindful of the way the creatures tongue had snaked, long and determined, from its terrible jaws to wrap around his throat and squeeze for just a second, hard enough to stop his breath and make his heart beat faster than it already was.

Behind the door was a long, bare, and sad looking classroom—made bleaker still by lines of ancient, battered desks. A child sat at one of those desks. The child looked up when they came into the room and Brock was startled to find himself gazing into his own blue-green eyes. The child version of himself could not see him though and quickly went back to the loneliness of the book he’d been reading. A feeble fire did a slow dance in the room’s tiny fireplace and did nothing to dispel the chill in the room.

“ _So sad, Eddie_ ,” Venom said, from the ceiling crouched over the child.

“Fuck you,” Brock said without thinking. Despite his brash reply, he felt the heat of tears in his eyes as he watched the lonely, miserable boy that he had been. A boy he had quickly forgotten as soon as he possibly could.

He did not realize that he had been blinded by these tears, and, so, missed the lightning fast way that Venom moved to come up behind him. He felt, instead, the powerful arms that slid around his waist from behind and held him tight and the press of wicked claws into the flatness of his stomach.

“ _You will never know loneliness again_ ,” Venom promised him.

Brock liked the sound of that. He liked it more than he ever would admit. He shook the creature off and stepped out of the tight ring of its arms. “What are we doing here,” he asked. “What kind of trial is this? What is this supposed to prove?”

Venom stared down at him intently and then reached out one clawed hand, balled up, and flicked him hard across the nose with one finger. It startled him and it _hurt_. “Motherfucker!” Eddie cursed. And Venom’s long maw turned up into a predatory kind of smile. The creature pointed past him with one finger—toward the window. “ _Your friend has shown up, Eddie_.”

Brock turned to see a figure in the window. The man wore tight green and was mindless of the weather outside. He held a bow and arrow and a pale feather decorated his pointed cap. A little green cape fluttered in the chill wind. He was the very picture of bravery and confidence. Just standing there, he commanded the respect of everyone and everything around him.

“Robin Hood,” Brock marveled and all the tears and all the sadness evaporated in the face of this joyous new arrival. “I remember one Christmas when I was here all alone, and he did come just like this, right out of the pages of the book I was reading.”

They had visited him all the time, the heroes out of stories. They had made the isolation more bearable.

“ _You wanted to be a hero, Eddie_ ,” Venom said, excitedly. Little tendrils of deepest black exploded from its massive body and reached out and touched him everywhere. With every touch came a rough suckling. Eddie was flooded with sensation as the sucking tendrils landed on his nipples and the tip of his dick. They sucked at his thighs and his balls. “ _I can make you strong and fast. All you have to do is marry me forever and ever_.”

_Marry_?

“You are out of your _fucking_ mind,” Brock snarled. He struggled against the thing’s desire to envelope him, but only found himself being drawn closer as closer as the sucking of his flesh began to hurt. His treacherous dick was rock hard though with one of the tendrils locked on the tip in an attempt to suck out his very soul.

He had the sudden idea that Robin Hood was watching this abuse from the window, and the thought was horrible to him. He struggled all the harder because of it and just became more and more wrapped up in Venom—tangled in him.

 

It definitely wasn’t a lonely feeling, being tangled up in this monster this way. Venom took him over totally and completely and he feared it greatly. He feared the way it made him feel. His flesh ached and throbbed where the creature touched him. _It feels_ , he thought, _it feels…good_.

The intermingling of pleasure and pain as he managed to tear some of the sucking tendrils free and his flesh mottled and reddened from the casual abuse. But the tendrils only attached themselves to other places and he was dragged closer and closer to the big, bulky, black body.

In his vain thrashing, he happened to glance back at the lonely boy that he had been, who was still reading his book, oblivious to the struggle. The child shuddered with the cold and drew his too-thin jacket closer on his frail shoulders. Brock gave up his struggles suddenly and completely. He collapsed to his knees.

“I wish,” he muttered softly. “I wish…but it’s too late now.”

Venom was dragging him the rest of the short distance across the floor—greedy and triumphant, but the creature paused. _“You wish what, Eddie?”_ It asked, and there was genuine curiosity in its dark and terrible voice.

“Nothing,” Brock said. “Nothing. Parker sits all day in a cold office just like this. I should have given him more coal for the fire. That’s all.”

The tendrils released him. The monster leaned down until its dark visage was level with his. “Let’s see another Christmas, Eddie.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9**

Brock watched in awe as the boy he had been grew larger, and the room became darker and dirtier. The windows cracked, the panels, fine once, shrunk. There were chunks of plaster missing from the ceiling. He recalled this time vividly. He was alone again. All the other boys had gone home for the holidays.

He wasn’t reading now. Instead, he was walking the room in an agitated kind of despair. Brock glared at Venom, but the monster wasn’t looking at him. It was looking toward the door of the classroom—a door that was now closed. Brock’s gaze helplessly, expectantly, and _anxiously_ , followed the monster’s.

The door opened and a girl walked in. She was dressed in modest finery and was only a little older than the boy was now. She had the same dark hair and the same blue green eyes. She was his sister, Francis.

“No one else knows, but I know that you hid Darcy Peterson’s cat only to play the hero for having found him. There’s something wrong with you, Edward. You want to be the hero so badly, but you lie. Real heroes don’t lie. What part of that don’t you understand?”

She sighed when he didn’t answer her. “Regardless, I’ve come not just for a visit. This time, I’ve come to bring you home.”

“Home?” the boy that Brock had been repeated. A flicker of joy lit his somber blue-green eyes.

“Yes,” his sister replied. “Home for good, it seems. Father had finally forgiven you for the accident of your birth that killed Mother. He has forgiven you while I have not. Nevertheless, you are to gather your things and we are to be away from here.”

The light of joy that had lit those blue-green eyes momentarily dimmed and then went out completely. The boy’s shoulders slumped. “I didn’t hide Darcy’s cat,” Younger Brock said, softly. “I found him. I did.”

Francis sighed in exasperation, walked across the room, grabbed the boy by the hand and led him outside. Brock reached out and touched her coat as the memories passed him.

“You’d be a much better little brother if you could stop lying all the time,” Francis was telling the younger Brock. Older Brock mouthed every word of that sentence along with her.

“She hated me,” Brock said to Venom when the memories were gone. “She loved our Mother more than anything in the world and I was responsible for taking that from her. I was a murderer on the day I was born. I killed a woman I don’t even remember. How does somebody live with that?”

“ _I kill people all the time_ ,” Venom replied, nonchalantly. “ _They’re delicious_.”

For some reason this struck Brock as funny. He laughed softly, genuinely, but only for a little while. “Fran married soon after this, had a child, and then died from a wasting disease. I hadn’t seen her in a long time when it happened.”

“A child?” Venom asked, softly, white eyes glittering in the somber light.

“My nephew,” Brock replied.


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10**

 

Brock heard the soft and sudden lilt of festive music. His environment changed before his eyes again, this time far more quickly and completely than the last. One moment, he was in the old classroom and the next he was in the busy thoroughfares of a city. Many people passed him on the blistery street. Festive banners hung from the lamp poles and multi-hued lights alerted him to the fact that this was another Christmas.

Venom loped on all fours ahead of him. Slightly panicked at the concept of being left behind wherever this was, Brock hurried and followed. Venom drew to a stop before a certain warehouse door, and Brock smiled as the music swelled from behind it. He knew this place. Of course he did.

“I was apprenticed here!” he breathed.

They went in and the music led them to an old gentleman who sat behind a high desk. Brock cried out in great excitement, “That’s Mr. Cuthbert! Bless his heart! I have not thought of him these last years.”

The old man glanced up from his work to view a clock that hung in the chamber. The hands read seven o’clock. He rubbed his hands and cried out in an excited voice, “Alexander! Edward! It’s quitting time!”

Brock’s former self, a young man now, appeared post haste. He was followed by his fellow apprentice.

“Alexander Thompson,” Brock said, softly. The smile on his face wavered a little, but did not die. “There he is. He was very much my…friend.”

He weighed that final word and then quickly embraced it. Yes, friend was a good word. Friend was always the word they’d used—the acceptable, realistic word.

“There’ll be no more work tonight, boys,” Cuthbert said. “It’s Christmas Eve, Alex! Christmas, Edward! And we are having a party!”

They closed and cleared the warehouse in no time at all. They set up decorations and lit candles. The place was transformed from semi-somber workplace to a marvelous and warm ballroom.

A hired fiddler knocked and was allowed in just before the first guests showed up, but after him, the door never stopped opening. People came from all around to attend the Cuthbert’s Christmas party. The first arrivals were the remaining Cuthbert’s themselves—Mrs. Cuthbert and her three lovely young daughters. After them came the six very serious suitors who sought to marry one or the other of those feisty girls and were sorely disappointed. The party was filled with employees and cousins, the little boy across the street and the kind Baker from down the road. The cook brought his brothers and the milkman. All were welcome, all were joyful. Some joy was shy. Some was bold. Some graceful. Some awkward. But a good time was had by all.

Brock found himself moving with the merriment, watching these friends of old, foot tapping in time with the music that had stayed in his head, somewhere, all these years. He was not aware of Venom snaking up behind him—watching him.

For just a moment, for Brock, all was marvelous and right with the world.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter 11**

 

Brock’s whole heart and soul were in the scene. He remembered and enjoyed everything. The ball went on until eleven o’clock. After eleven, a line was formed at the door and every party guest was gifted a Merry Christmas by the kind hosts. When all the guests were gone, the employees were gifted with a Merry Christmas as well.

Slightly drunk and leaning on one another, the apprentices were left to inhabit the big warehouse until the next day. Their beds were in the back, beneath one of the counters. They wobbled in that direction, laughing and extolling the virtues of their generous employer.

Brock, who had been enjoying himself so thoroughly and completely, watched them go with a burgeoning trepidation. Every wobbly step they took toward the back room increased his distress.

“ _Something wrong, Eddie_?” Venom asked, from behind and close enough to make Brock jump.

“No,” Brock lied, too quickly. He put some space between him and the thing, and then turned around to face it completely.

“ _They are going, you and your friend. Don’t you want to follow_?” Venom asked, curiously.

“No,” Brock snapped.

The strange white eyes narrowed to pale slits in the darkness of Venom’s face. “ _So you wouldn’t mind if I_ ate _that one then_ ,” A dark finger pointed at Alex.

“None of this is real,” Brock said. “I don’t care what you do.”

The slits disappeared completely. The monstrous face loomed down at him. “ _I’m_ definitely _eating him now, Eddie_.”

Moving with incredible speed and dexterity, the thing leapt up and bounded across the ceiling. Brock actually screamed as he hurried in pursuit. Venom roared in response to the horror in the scream and moved faster.

The monster reached his destination before the man. Venom was coiled, prepared to spring as Brock finally caught up to him. But the monster didn’t spring. And the people that he menaced didn’t notice him at all.

They were wrapped up in each other—those apprentices. Younger Brock had pretty blond Alex pressed against the back wall. Alex’s pants were down around his ankles and Younger Brock was fucking him like sex was going to go out of fashion in a minute and he needed to hurry up.

Brutal thrust after brutal thrust tried to embed Alex in the wall. Alex quivered and rocked with the power of the rough hard ass pounding. Brock’s hand was pressed over Alex’s mouth. Alex was biting that hand so hard a thin trickle of blood slid from the palm. The pain only made Younger Brock fuck harder.

He was mesmerized by the scene, nearly as thoroughly as he’d been mesmerized by the merriment of the party. Only Venom’s angry roar distracted him from the stifled moans and hard slapping flesh. Then the big monster was on him, picking him up bodily, and bounding away with him.

They crashed through the closed and locked warehouse door in an explosion of wood and metal. And then Venom leapt up on the roof, and across that roof and over to the next one and on and on until Brock was dizzy and breathless.

He was thinking though—despite the speed and volition of Venom’s pantherine movements. They were miserable thoughts along the lines of being tired of Venom’s trials…and if the thing were going to eat him, he wished it would just do it and get it over with.

Getting his head bitten off at the neck had to be better than visiting these past miseries.

He couldn’t take much more of this.

He _wouldn’t_.

He also had the thought that he wouldn’t mind hosting such a grand office party. It would only cost him a little bit and the reward would far outweigh that niggling cost. Why had he never done it before?


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter 12**

“ _We are nearly done with the first trial_ ,” Venom said, dropping Brock, unceremoniously, in the snow. “ _I had another too, before you, so I won’t hold Alex against you._ ”

Brock got to his feet and glared at the thing. “Well, thank goodness for that.”

Venom chuckled. “ _Aren’t you the least bit curious_?”

“About your ‘other’?” Brock asked. “Certainly not. The mess you made of Jameson…who in their right mind would want a _love_ like that?”

A thick dark tendril erupted from the crotch of the thing. It formed itself into a veiny and  gargantuan phallus the size of a baseball bat. Brock backed away from the perceived threat. And Venom leapt at him and bore him down in the snow. The creature’s long, snake-like tongue lathed him all over, licking over his face, his nipples, wrapping around the base of his dick and tugging before snapping back into its gaping jaws.

“ _You’re scared_ ,” Venom said, gleefully.

He was. That gargantuan dick rested on his stomach, heavy and hot. There was no way that thing was going to fit inside him. He would absolutely die if the monster tried—split asunder. Absolute panic flooded him in a cold, titan wave. Along with panic came rage, and self-preservation, and everything else that wanted nothing to do with being torn apart by that obscene monster cock.

“I’m not! You’re a nightmare I’m having and nothing more!” he snarled, and punched it in the face with every fiber of his being inherent in the force of the blow and every subsequent blow that came after it. The thing’s head rocked and rolled under the brutal assault, but its expression didn’t change—and that expression was dark, intense, and hungry.

“ _You do lie a lot, Eddie_ ,” Venom growled. “ _But I lie a lot too. We should agree never to lie to one another. That is the foundation for a good, lasting relationship. So I will tell you the truth now. Jameson was not my ‘other’. Jameson was a vehicle. He was something I used to get around. He also made a decent snack. His liver, devoured bit by bit over these last seven years, was particularly tasty_.”

Brock just kept right on hitting it. He was getting a perverse kind of satisfaction out of the fear and violence. The adrenaline rush had pleasure in it.

Venom didn’t seem to mind. The lust in those strange, white eyes only seemed to increase blow for blow.

“ _My other was another entirely. He was a real hero, Eddie. He rejected me. And I’m going to kill him one day. He did teach me something though, something really important when searching for that most important ‘other’, and that was to find one who suits. One who lies like me, and is bad at being a hero like me. One who tries like me and fails like me…”_

That gargantuan dick slid around Brock’s waist two or three times—and then Venom _squeezed_. After only a moment or two, it hurt. It hurt like hell. He stopped hitting it and cried out against the pain of being squeezed to death. His hands lost their fists as he clawed into the flesh of the strange choking phallus.

The sound of heartrending weeping interrupted his struggle. His head turned instinctively in the direction of the pitiful sound. They were on an empty country road just outside the town where they had just partied with the Cuthbert’s’. Near them, was a copse of trees large enough to hide a horse and buggy from potential passersby on the road.

He didn’t even realize that Venom had let him go as he got up and moved toward the piteous sounds of misery. He recognized this road. They had hidden here innumerable times. They had always had to hide because what they were doing was wrong in the eyes of everyone else. He recognized the weeping too. His heart hurt to hear it again. He had buried that terrible sound deep. And, now, here he was hearing it again—feeling the agony of it again.

He turned into the copse of trees and saw himself, only a little older than he’d been the last time. His former self’s gaze was cold as he gazed upon the little blond seated next to him in the buggy’s seat. Alex was a mess, a weeping wailing mess, and in the gaze of his former self he saw distaste for the state of the other male. “You have to understand,” he was telling Alex, his voice clipped and cool and reasonable, “that we can’t do this anymore. It isn’t right, Alex. Someone will find out and it will be the ruin of both of us. Tell me that you understand.”

“I understand,” Alex said, “that you’ve been keeping company with Anne Weying. And that she has it in her head that you are going to marry her.” A pretty pair of sable eyes rose to meet those of his former self. “Is it true, Eddie? Is she the reason that you’re doing this? Is she the reason that you’re leaving me.”

“No,” Brock’s former self said, irritated. “Anne has nothing to do with this. Her father is the publisher of the Globe. If Anne loves me, it will make getting a position at the paper easier, that’s all--”

“You’re a terrible person, Eddie,” Alex said, softly. “I don’t mean anything to you anymore, if I ever did. You have love for only money and success. You think those things will make you happy. They won’t. I would have made you happy. I would have spent my life doing that.”

“What would people say?” Brock’s former self asked. “What would they do? How many doors would be closed to us?”

“The door to the Globe, surely,” Alex whispered dully, and dried his eyes with his sleeves.

“You had to know how this was going to end, Alex,” Former Brock said, softly. “Be reasonable. We can still be friends--”

Tears turned into a kind of hysterical laughter. “ _Reasonable_? _Friends_? I miss being apprenticed with you, Eddie. I will always miss it. In that big dark warehouse at night we were free for a little while, weren’t we? Free of the demands and expectations of other people. Free to be ourselves.”

Alex leaned in and kissed him then. Older Brock remembered the warmth of that body pressed against his own, obliterating the chill of the night, seeking to bond with him through the impossibility of their separate skins.

And then Alex climbed out of the buggy and walked away. Brock had never seen him again.


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter 13**

The scene went utterly black, and Brock looked down to find Venom’s powerful arms locked around him from behind. He could feel the liquid brush of the monster against him. He whirled in that dark embrace, and yelled up in the face of the thing. “I don’t want to see anymore! Take me home! Why do you delight in torturing me?”

The towering thing leaned down on him. Simultaneously, one long, dark finger moved beneath his chin and tilted it up. “ _Torturing you will be my favorite delight Eddie,”_ It promised _. “But not like this, no. There is one more thing that you must see_.”

“No!” he roared at it. He was feeling ten things at once and all of them hurt. He hadn’t felt any emotional pain in such a long time. He hadn’t really felt much of anything. He’d liked it like that. And now this monster was force feeding him the pain of his life. “No more! I don’t wish to see it! Show me no more!”

But the merciless beast forced him anyway. The scene changed, as suddenly as abruptly as the last time and the time before that. They were in yet another place. The room was not very large and not very beautiful, but it was comfortable and cozy. In a chair, by a warm winter fire, sat Alex. He was a little older, but nonetheless beautiful for that age.

The room was noisy and there were many children in it. All the children were blond, like Alex, and in each one of their merry faces, Brock saw some of his old ‘friend’. The scene was chaotic as the children played and roughhoused. No one seemed to mind the chaos. They talked. They laughed.

There was a knock on the door and the children rushed out of the room to answer it. They came back in with a tall, good-looking man with sky blue eyes and red hair. The man was positively laden with gifts and the children clamored over him trying to get them.

Brock was hypnotized by it—the joy in the little scene as the man made his way through the throng of children to Alex, and leaned down and planted a kiss on the blond’s lips. “If your sister drops off another one of her children, we are going to have to trade this little house in for a shoe, “he whispered in Alex’s ear.

“These are my children,” Alex said, softly, proudly. “Ours. Where would they be without us? I’d gladly live in a shoe to have them.”

Brock’s heart hurt as the red haired man laughed good-naturedly. It was a lovely family and it might have been his if...

“Alex,” the red haired man said. “I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Edward Charles Allan Brock,” the red-head said. “I passed his office this morning and happened to look in the window. It’s Christmas day, and he was there bright and early hunched over his work. He’s quite alone in the world, I do believe.”

“Venom!” Brock said in a broken voice. “Get me out of here! Please! Venom please!”

He had never begged for anything in his life but he really didn’t want to hear what Alex was going to say next. He didn’t think that he could stand to hear it. “This is not my memory. What kind of sadistic game are you playing, you bastard?!”

“You can’t blame me, Eddie,” Venom said. “All that I have shown you was put in place by you.”

Brock was so tired suddenly, so tired. His legs gave out from under him and Venom caught him. Dark fingers moved over his face, wiping away the tears that he wasn’t even aware were there. They were in his bedroom again. He was conscious of that, and then Edward Charles Allan Brock was asleep.


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter 14**

He woke up sometime later, having been chased out of sleep by a liquid black nightmare with teeth. He sat up in bed, his heart pounding, his lips stretched into a soundless scream. It took him a moment to realize the he wasn’t in any immediate danger. He was quite alone in his room. He was naked and covered in bruises, but alone.

He got up and wandered around in the darkness for a minute, testing the shadows for sentience—for Venom. The door to the room was broken, chips of wood and metal everywhere from its implosion. The greasy slick stain that remained of J. Jonah Jameson was still there as well. And his ass hurt. These things made it impossible for him to pretend like this was all a dream that he had mercifully woken up from.

He took the time to put on some clothes, because the thing had told him that the second trial would start soon. He glanced at the clock and couldn’t make any sense of the fact that it read one a.m. Had he slept a full twenty-four hours with no interruption? It was less than surprising considering he had not a friend in the world to check on or worry about him.

He rushed into trousers, shirt and shoes, pulling them on like armor against Venom’s advances. The clock struck one and he turned wildly with the sound trying to anticipate which corner the thing would crawl out of before it came. He waited for more than twenty minutes and nothing happened, no towering man-eating monstrosity appeared to talk to him about love and marriage.

As scared as he was, he didn’t even consider running. He had learned things last night. Many important things. If there were more things to learn, then he wanted to learn them.

He was trembling in an absolute agony of anticipation by the time something did happen. A pool of dark liquid slid through that shattered bedroom door. Inky and black, it came at him preternaturally fast and predatorily. With a start, he moved to avoid it and managed to get out into the hallway before it caught him.

He fell back into it. It embraced him like a lover might as he drowned in it. His clothes were torn away from him again—dissolved this time—in the greedy liquid. Hot liquid forced its way up his ass and then hardened within, taking up all the space within and throbbing, before retracting and slamming deep and hard inside him again. A slick band of liquid crawled across his mouth to cut off his cries at this violation. Another hot liquid band moved to cover his dick and a rough suction began.

His arms and legs were jerked apart until he was spread eagle in the pool—unable to move or defend himself in any way. He wasn’t even thinking about it. The wet stuff squeezed and lathed and sucked his balls. The suction on his dick was constant and demanding. The hot, hard thrusting in his ass demanded his full attention. And then he was flipped, abruptly around, suspended in the air for a moment on inky tendrils and then slammed back down into the sticky wetness. Forced on his hands and knees by the demanding tendrils, he felt a wave of the stuff at his back and he was penetrated again, with something that wasn’t quite as big as a baseball bat, but definitely bigger than any dick had a right to be.

The noises that he made were pitiful, but he couldn’t really think about it beyond simple acknowledgement. Too many things were happening to him too fast. A dark tendril was wrapped around his throat. It choked him sometimes--just stopped his breath for moments at a time before allowing him the luxury of breathing again. Several tendrils went about the busy task of beating his ass. The hot, hard lashes fell like rain, driving him forward in desperation to get away from them only to be dragged back again and have that hard phallus shoved deeper, rougher, inside him.

All the while it was sucking his dick in its strange way. Smaller tendrils locked around peaked nipples, sucking and squeezing those. And then he couldn’t breathe as the thing around his throat denied him breath. And then it began all over again. The orgasm was _taken_ from him. He came so hard, arched, beaten and screaming into the blackness that he passed out.

He woke up moments later. He was in the grips of the thing, and Venom, in its more humanoid form, was bounding over rooftops. “Where are we going?” he asked.

The thing did not look at him, so intent was it on achieving whatever destination it had in mind. The world was changing all around them. Some of the cities Brock knew and other’s he did not. For just a second, he was pretty sure he and Venom were bounding through Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest, and the next second, the vista was steel gray and alien, and then that changed too—shutter quick.

“ _Last night’s trial was your past, Eddie. And you passed it. You cried. For yourself. For the first time ever, yes_?”

Brock looked away from it. “Yes.”

The thing clutched him tighter. _Possessively_.  It did look at him then. Its dark expression was particularly long and toothy. “ _Tonight your trial concerns the present. Don’t fail. I’d hate to have to eat you._ ”


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter 15**

Venom bounded onto a street on Christmas morning. He could tell that it was Christmas because a group of carolers passed them singing holiday cheer. The surrounding houses were in a dingy, dismal state, but the people seemed happy nonetheless. Brock was dropped in the snow again unceremoniously.

Venom pointed to a particularly ramshackle house. “ _Hurry up_ ,” it snapped. “ _I’m in a hurry to marry you_.”

Brock clamored to his feet and glared at the monstrosity. “I’m not going to marry you, you _whatever-the-fuck-you-are_!”

“ _Symbiote_ ,” Venom said, slowly, in the tone that one would use for a slow-witted child.

Brock thought about arguing with the thing but he was curious about where he was and why he had been brought here. He walked up to the door of the sorry looking house and it opened for him as if in invitation. He walked inside to view a raggedy, but meticulously clean, dwelling. There was no real comfort in the meager furnishing, but whoever lived here was trying. He could admire that.

The main room was empty but for some sparse furniture. It was the kind of place that had rat holes in the walls and high cracks under the door for the wind to get through. But someone had meticulously blocked the cracks and the holes to keep the vermin and the chill wind out.

He heard a weak coughing from a back room and was moving in that direction when a portly woman swept into the house from outside. She had two children with her, and each of them carried different platters of food. She and the children bustled toward the kitchen and Brock found himself following them. They were not people he recognized, but he liked the smiles on their faces along with the scent of the food they carried. The woman turned her attention toward that back room and her cherry face darkened for a second with concern. She corrected the expression quickly, smiling again for the children. “This is going to be a great feast indeed,” she told them. And they quickly and happily agreed with her.

Within the small, sparse kitchen the woman and the children went about diligent preparation, laying out their dishes and then rushing off to get more preparations. Softly, the little girl asked the woman if, “I can see Aunt Mae?”

The woman smiled. “She’s Peter’s aunt, dear. She’s our sweet friend.”

“Peter’s my friend, Mama. Aunt Mae is my aunt. And his aunt too.”

The woman laughed. “Alright, dear. Let me peek in at Aunt Mae and if she’s well enough, you can see her.”

The little girl clapped happily and went back to the seriousness of her party preparations.

The portly woman went into that back room and Brock followed her. This couldn’t be Peter Parker’s house. The man clearly stated needing the day off to be with his family year after year. This small sparse house was not the dwelling of a young man with a family.

He looked around, ignoring Venom, who had become a shadow in the corner with that strange elongated neck and head only for some form of a ‘body’. _And those teeth_ , Brock thought, _don’t forget the teeth_. 

His employee couldn’t live here. He followed the woman into the darkness of the room. There, on a rickety bed with too little covers, lay a skeletal stick figure of a woman with snow white hair piled on her head in a neat ball.

“Is Peter home, dearest Bella?” the skeleton asked, weakly.

“Not yet, Mae,” Bella answered. “Lilly would like to give you a hug or two or ten thousand if you’re up to it. And our little Christmas feast is almost ready. Peter wouldn’t miss that, I assure you.”

Aunt Mae laughed and that sent her into a fit of coughing that had Bella across the room and hovering over her in a mili-second.

“Perhaps Peter has quite that job with that awful Mr. Brock and run off to start a life with a nice girl,” Aunt Mae said, wistfully. “Wouldn’t that be nice, Bella?”

Bella chuckled in disapproval. “Don’t talk like that Mae. If you and your dearly departed Ben hadn’t taken Peter in after his parents died, it would have been the workhouse for him. He loves you. He would never leave you.”

“That’s what I’m worried about, Bella. It isn’t right that he works so hard to support me, especially for that penny-pinching, slave driving, asshole Brock.”

Bella produced a rickety wooden wheelchair and helped the older woman into it. When the task was accomplished, she put her hands on her hips in satisfaction. “This will be Peter’s gift. To see you up and about this Christmas is the finest of presents. Are you sure you’re up to it, Mae?”

Aunt Mae gave her a wink and a weak smile. “How long have we been planning this Bella? Of course, I’m up to it.”

“A certain munchkin of mine will be very happy too, I’m sure. She misses you, you know.”

“Then let’s go see her,” Mae said, determinedly, but her voice shook and her hands shook. She looked to Brock like she might fall apart at any moment—wispy, ephemeral, and ghost-like.

“Peter’s home!” the children called, excitedly from the other room. There was a suddenly flurry of activity, but it was definitely Peter Parker who walked into that house with a child in each arm. Peter’s threadbare clothes were darned and brushed to look seasonable, and there a big smile stretched across a face that was too young to look that tired.

“An adult!” Peter shouted, “I need an adult. I am being torn apart by feral children and I need an adult to save me.”

“Aren’t you an adult Peter?” the little girl asked.

“I am a child at heart,” Peter laughed. That laughter stopped when he spotted Bella wheeling Aunt Mae into the room. His expression flickered from happiness to concern and then back to happiness again. “Aren’t I, Aunt Mae?”

“You’re a brat,” Aunt Mae said. “Merry Christmas, brat. It is a meager gift, but it’s all I’ve got.”

He put the children down and went to hug her—enveloping her and the back of the chair in his eager grasp. “I can think of nothing better than Christmas dinner with you.”

“That’s—that’s sad, Peter,” Aunt Mae said, delighted.

“No it isn’t,” Peter said, softly, and hugged her tightly. “It’s wonderful. Are you sure you’re okay, _Mom_?”

She stroked his hair lightly, lovingly. “Yes, I’m sure.”

Brock didn’t believe a word she said. No one looking at her could. She wasn’t as old as he’d thought she was, first of all. Thin and frail and deathly ill, she was older than he, but not an old woman by any stretch of the imagination. _The Wasting disease,_ he thought in horror. It had taken his sister relatively quickly. Had she looked like this in the end?

Venom didn’t move, didn’t speak. Even that bizarre thing it did where it crafted a head of the lump of itself to speak with him was mute. It was just a grotesque lump in the corner—writhing on itself, twisting it its own darkness. Brock actually wished that it would say something as the tiny family and friends sat down to the meager dinner they called a feast.

He didn’t speak to it though. Fuck it if it wanted to become a mute for the first time since meeting it. Instead, he watched the pleasant little dinner, which was only interrupted once or twice by Aunt Mae going into violent fits of coughing. She had a particularly bad fit when Peter toasted Mr. Brock as founder of the Christmas feast.

“That selfish, horrible man!” she said, coughing out her potatoes. “He works you like an animal for next to nothing, gives you credit for nothing, and you want to thank him. You are too good, Peter. I am not nearly as good. To the devil with Edward Brock!”

Brock looked over at the devil where it pulsed in the high corner of the room.

“Aunt Mae, its Christmas Day.”

“I know,” Aunt Mae breathed, “but the man is such an a--!”

The curse on her lips died due to the presence of the curious children, but Brock understood it well enough.

“Christmas Day,” Peter reminded her again, and held up his chipped glass.

“You’re too good, Peter,” she said, and held up her chipped glass to meet his. “I’ll toast to his health for your sake and day, but not for his. Long life to him! A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, Brock! You’ll be very merry and very happy, I’m sure.”

Sometime later, she ended the night with a, “Merry Christmas to all, my dears,” and was, summarily, wheeled back into her room.

As the meal dispersed and the friends went to their own home and Peter went to sleep on the threadbare living room couch that served as his bed, Brock couldn’t take it anymore. “She’s going to die, isn’t she? The only person he’s got in the world?”

Venom slid from the dark corner he’d been coiling in. It moved across the floor in a dark and flowing coil that slid over Brock’s feet and up his leg, over his cock, and around his waist, over his left nipple and around his throat. That strange detached head moved out of the writhing mess, and stared him directly in the eyes.

“ _I am not a fortune teller_ ,” Venom said, “ _but the old bag looks pretty dead to me already. If events stay as they are now, she will die, Eddie. And Parker, who lost his parents as a child, and his Uncle Ben most recently, will know what it feels like to be all alone in the world. You know that feeling, don’t you, Eddie_?”

“You know I do,” Brock snapped at it. It seemed to like that because it squeezed him just then—a hug with just a little bit of a threat in it.

“Let’s go,” Venom said with that sharp, sharp mouth of his. “We have much to see…”

Brock felt the sharp sting of several lashes across his ass in rapid succession. The pain, on top of the aching redness that was already there, made him hop and curse.

“…and much to _do_ ,” Venom smirked.


	16. Chapter 16

**Chapter 16**

Before the last angry aching cry had left his mouth, Brock was in another humble home. Someone was laughing, and Brock thought he recognized that hearty, ready laugh. He’d heard it many times despite the cruelty that he piled upon its owner. He stumbled from the empty room he stood in and into the next. There, his nephew, Philip, stood by the fireplace, doubled over with laughter. Seating next to him, in a comfortable enough looking chair, his nephew’s wife, Sophia, laughed just as hard.

“ _I want to know what’s so funny_ ,” Venom, his big, muscular, humanoid-self, demanded.

“He said that Christmas was a humbug,” cried Philip. “He believed it too!”

“ _What’s a humbug_?” Venom asked, curiously.

“Shut up,” Brock told him.  

Venom’s eyes narrowed. “ _You_ like _being molested. You do things to make it happen. That’s a truth, Eddie, and we both know you don’t know much about it, but you should own this one_.”

“You interrupt my life, kill my friend, assault me, walk me through my nightmares, and then blame _me_? That’s rich.”

The creature took a step toward him and Brock flinched. He didn’t run. He didn’t move much at all—but he did flinch. Venom grinned its terrible toothy grin in wicked, satisfied, response.

“Shame on him!” Sophia said, distracting Brock from his personal monster.

“It _is_ a shame,” Philip agreed, sobering a little. “But he is suffering for it every day. I can’t really think of a bad thing to say about him. He is such a miserable creature, I can only feel sympathy.”

“Money,” Philip scoffed. “If my uncle’s life is what money does to you, then I am content to stay church mouse poor.”

They dissolved in laughter again, and then Philip continued, “All that money is useless to him. He doesn’t do any good with it.”

“I’ve never even met him,” Sophia said, “and I can’t stand him.”

“I could stand him if he’d let me,” Philip said, softly. “I feel sorry for him, dear Sophia. And you should too.”

While this was a rather private conversation, there was a party going on in the adjoining rooms. Venom wandered away from the two seated by the fire in favor of watching those festivities. Brock looked in that direction, his gaze following the creature.

Philip’s friends were enjoying their Christmas feast, as were Sophia’s brothers. It was a lovely celebration with much laughter and dancing.

“I will continue to ask him every year until one of us dies,” Philip said, resolutely. “There’s good company to be had with us, and much laughter, and something to be a…to be a… _part_ of.” He reached down and drew his pretty wife from her chair and up into his arms. “He will be angry when I ask to be sure,” he said, planting a kiss on her throat, “but I can stand his anger once a year. What I can’t stand is his misery.”

They were interrupted a moment later by an excited child and went to join the rest of their guests for a wonderful tea. They played music, for Sophia’s brothers were musicians and Sophia was one too. She played the harp beautifully.

The harp’s music Brock liked particularly well. Listening to it cast him back over the things he’d learned since Venom had crashed in his bedroom door. He found that he didn’t mind having learned it, even in the horrible way that it had been brought to him. He liked listening to Sophia’s songs so much he wondered if he might have been a different sort of person if only he’d heard them sooner.

He was unaware of the way his body moved in time with the marvelous music; unaware of the way he clapped his hands, unaware of his own merry smile. Perhaps, if he had heard this music earlier, he thought, he might have been compelled to invite people to hear it with him like this. And he wouldn’t have to die the same way that the man he’d most patterned himself after, Jameson, had died, devoured by some kind of macabre Christmas rapist.

He had never been a religious man, but, as he danced there, he understood that this had very little to do with religion. Here was human kindness, generosity and compassion. Here was human joy expressed in song and dance and laughter.

And it was _beautiful_.

He was so moved by it that he got Venom’s attention. He felt that moment strongly. The things consideration washed over him in a hot titan wave.  He was mad about that. He wanted to dance.

“You look happy, Eddie,” the creature said. It looked genuinely pleased.

They had pushed the table aside to make room for wild dancing, and Brock longed to be out there with them—a naked savage ghost in bruised war paint dancing in their shadows.

“I’ll stay happy as long as you keep your _tentacles_ to yourself.” Brock growled as Venom came to block his view of the joyous revelers.

“ _We have to go_ ,” Venom said, “Liar.”

Brock begged without thinking. “Just thirty minutes more.”

Venom nodded and stood to its full seven-foot-six-inch height. It offered him its dark, clawed hand. “ _We’ll dance then_ ,” it said. “ _For thirty minutes. That is what you want to do, isn’t it_?”

Brock stared at the thing. He felt color rising beneath his flesh. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, backing away from it.

But, lightening fast, it grabbed his wrist and drew him close. He struggled as he came into full body contact with its strange, warm flesh. The feel of the thing was more familiar, already, than he was ever going to admit.

He cursed it, but it held him anyway, and then, gently, carefully, it turned them on the dance floor. The surrounding revelers, mindless of them, cheered happily as the music hit a swelling crescendo. The joy of that noise hit Brock hard and catapulted him out of what little was left of his common sense. He became a shadow that was dancing with a shadow that was dancing with them.

The waltz carried them all over the room. The monster’s movements were, strangely, perfect. And for just a little while, just twenty five minutes, Brock forgot that the thing that the creature that held him, and twirled him, and spun him, was a monster at all.

Brock danced so hard and so well that he exhausted himself soon enough. Some of the revelers broke away from dancing to play a game. He and Venom became interested in that. It was a simple game called Yes or No. Philip would think of something and the rest of the guests had to guess what that thing was. Philip could only respond to their questions with a yes or a no.

He was thinking of an animal, that much Brock could discern from the barrage of questions hurled at the young man. It was a disagreeable animal too, one that grunted and groaned. Brock thought it might be a bear. He said bear several times even though no one could hear him.

“I know,” said Sophia’s youngest brother. “I know what it is! I have guessed it!”

“What it is?” Philip asked.

“It’s your Uncle Brock!”

The room dissolved in laughter as if this was the funniest thing that anyone gathered had ever heard. And Sophia’s youngest brother was right and earned the prize.

“Well, that was a fun round thanks to Uncle Brock,” Philip said. “It would be wrong not to toast the health of someone who has given us such merriment.” He raised his glass and many glass rose to meet it. Here’s to Uncle Brock!”

“Uncle Brock!” the cheered.

“I wish him a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. He wouldn’t take it from me, but he’ll have it anyway. Uncle Brock!”

They cheered, good-naturedly, again, and Brock basked in it. He would have liked to thank them, he really would have, but the scene disappeared in the quick blink of an eye.


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter 17**

Time stopped meaning anything for Brock. They travelled to many places, he and Venom. Day and night, they visited many homes and always with a happy end. They visited cheerful sickbeds on foreign lands and patient, struggling men close to home. They visited the poor and the rich. Brock saw hope in hospitals and jails, in every place that misery could hide and breed and fester. Africa, Ireland, China, Eddie saw them all.

As the night that was many days and nights drew to a close, Brock began to notice that Venom wasn’t looking so good. In a dank chamber in India, where a mother was stroking her newborn daughter and promising to protect her until the day she died, Brock stared at the monster—who seemed thinner somehow, scene for scene. He had not mentioned it before, but the gargantuan thing looked weak now, frail.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked suddenly. His voice held the hint of the irritated coldness with which he usually addressed others.

Venom didn’t seem to mind. It looked up from contemplating the woman and child with hungry eyes. “ _Dying_ , _most likely_ ,” it said, simply.

Something deep, deep down in Brock’s heart twisted upon hearing that. “What?”

The creature turned that hungry gaze upon him, and Brock backed away from it, his body ached for the heat of it, he understood exactly what such a stare meant from the thing. It meant writhing around in that sticky darkness being fucked half to death—so hard the last time it had knocked him out completely.

“ _Do you care_?” Venom asked.

The question halted him in what was probably about to be full scale flight. His nipples ached, his cock throbbed, and his asshole clenched and sent a shudder of sweet pain rocketing through him just from being stared at so hungrily like that—like he was something to eat to this thing that ate people.

“I-I do,” Brock said, and Venom roared the sound savage and loud enough to force Eddie to put his hands to his ears to drown out the terrible sound. It extended an arm toward him and the damn thing, flowing and liquid and thick, kept right on extending until it pointed tip crashed into the wall beside him. Plaster exploded in a rain.

The thing came at him then in a liquid rush. It moved too fast for him to do anything but back into that broken wall. “You can’t lie to me, Eddie,” it said, softly, its terrible teeth clicking inches from his face, “I’m _inside_ you, remember?”

Brock stared directly, boldly, in its strange, white eyes. He didn’t know why, but he wasn’t as scared as he was supposed to be. This thing liked to intimidate him. It was good at it. But he was tired of being afraid. He stared at it directly and wasn’t really sure what he was going to say. They were interrupted by a knock on the chamber door.

Both turned to watch the woman climb out of bed at the sound. She was fully dressed and reached down to pull a small suitcase from underneath the bed.

“Fatima, is it done? You must be quick. The doctor will arrive any minute. She must be dead by then.”

“Only a moment,” the woman whispered. She moved toward the window, opened it, climbed out with the child in her arms and dropped into the darkness behind it.

The door knob turned impatiently after a little while, and then it came crashing open. The man looked around the room in startled rage to find it empty and then ran to the window, where he called out into the darkness, “Worthless bitch, a girl is worthless, a thief in her father’s house stealing his food for some other man! I catch you! I’ll catch you!”

“ _Ignorance_ ,” Venom said, darkly, and pressed himself closer into Brock. “ _What does it matter? You are an ignorant lot. What foolishness. Male or female, humans taste all the same_.”

“You should eat him,” Brock said softly.

“ _Ignorance and want are the things you creatures have to fear, Eddie. These are your real monsters. Want is bad as you will soon see, but ignorance is, by far, the worse of the two_.”

“Hurry up and e _at_ him already,” Brock demanded as the man left the room in pursuit of the woman and the infant.

Venom only chuckled—the sound much weaker than it should have been—and pushed him through the wall.


	18. Chapter 18

**Chapter 18**

 

Brock crashed backward on the floor of his bedroom. He was confused by the impossibility of being in two places at once, because he was looking at himself, fully dressed as he had been after arriving home from his lonely dinner. He was sprawled on the floor at his own feet. The black goo rolled weakly over what looked to be his corpse.

“ _Want_ ,” the word resounded in the dark little room. It was Venom’s voice coming from the mouth of the Brock that lay on the floor. He watched his own eyes open. They were jet black whites and all. “ _I don’t_ want _to take you against your will_.”

Brock laughed. He decided to go crazy and just be done with it. It was a simple decision. He decided he’d been working on it, pretty much, all of his miserable life. “A little late for _that_ , don’t you think?!” he roared.

He had never been so angry in his life. The rush of genuine emotion felt good.

“Pervert,” Venom snickered. There was lechery in the sound, but, more importantly, there was that weakness in it. That strange sound of weakness was driving Brock crazy and he didn’t know why. He definitely should not care if this thing died. “The men outside want, Eddie, as all men do. They are here to take what is yours. And, alone, won’t do anything about it.”

“Why?!” Brock asked. He shouted the remainder of the question into the dark alley behind him mansion as his world shifted suddenly.

Three men crouched in the shadowy darkness of that alleyway. They were dressed in black in an obvious effort to blend in. One man was a big as Brock and the second man was even bigger. The third man was short, fat, and speaking in low tones to the others.

Further down the alleyway, Brock noted the presence of another black draped man. Thin as a branch, he kept watch on the street.

“Every person has a right to take care of themselves,” the short, fat man was saying to his cohorts. “Brock always took care of himself, that’s for damn sure.”

“Ain’t it the truth?” The Brock-sized man brandished a knife in the darkness. “I’m going to pig-stick him at least once, the pompous, rich bastard. Maybe I’ll even kill him and do everyone a favor.”

They chuckled softly as they were joined by the thin lookout. “No sign of him,” the thin man said, glancing back nervously.

“Because your masked spook isn’t real, nutter,” the biggest man spat, disgusted.

“Say what you want,” the thin man replied. “But my own brother told saw him the flesh. He said he never seen anything move faster in his life, took out his whole crew in seconds and wrapped ‘em up for the cops. It was a man, he said, but the man moved like no man ever should. He moved like a … like …like a spider.”

“A spider man?” the biggest man scoffed.

The thin man shrugged. “That’s what my brother said.”

“Your brother’s nuttier than you are,” the fat man said, roughly. “Let’s get on with it.

Brock’s reality shifted again in a blink. “They’re going to rob me and potentially kill me on Christmas Day?” he found himself saying to his prone body as it lay on the floor of his bedroom.

He could hear people stumbling around downstairs, sudden soft curses and glass breaking.

“ _Yes, Eddie_ ,” Venom said in that same weakened tone. “We _are Venom, Eddie, and without your consent, I will die_.”

“ _Now_ you’re asking for consent?!” Brock snarled as several sets of heavy boots stomped their way up the mansion’s stairs.

“And so ends your second trial. The third is brief…” the mouth of Edward Charles Allan Brock moved from the floor. His black eyes glittered in the sudden illumination of lamp light moving swiftly up the hallway and toward Brock’s bedroom door.

“This door’s all smashed in,” someone outside said with open curiosity.

His own hand reached out to him, the nails swirling and black against the pale skin. “Imagine life without me, Eddie. Imagine life after this moment.”

Big bodies filled the doorway and the men stared at the body of the floor in horror. “What is it, Jonny,” one of them asked in horror. “What’s that stuff all over Brock? It’s moving. Oh my God, it’s moving!”

“I don’t care what it is,” the biggest man said, eyes narrowed and resolute, “I’m leaving here richer for having come.”

In his hands he held one of Brock’s own kerosene lamps. He dumped the liquid within on the writhing mass before him and then fumbled around in his pockets and produced a match, struck it, tossed it, and Venom screamed as he busted into flames. The sound was high, warbling, horrific and as alien as the thing that made it. There was anguish in it. It was an agony great enough to have the men that heard it clutching their ears and stepping back away from the noise.

Brock screamed too. He just didn’t hear himself doing it, because he was running the short distance across the floor in a frantic effort to clutch his own hand.

And the scene changed.


	19. Chapter 19

**Chapter 19**

Brock found himself suddenly on that gunmetal vista. He was still screaming when he got there, his arm outstretched and reaching toward the flat gray planes of the landscape before him. Above him, the many ringed moon’s glittered illuminating the bizarre world before his startled eyes. A shape moved in the near distance and stalked, slowly, near. It was Venom, but the big creature was wasted thin now for all its height. Now and again, it would fold into itself as it came, become a thrashing little ball that lashed out with its many tentacles and forced itself again into humanoid shape.

“What are you playing at, you weird thing?” Brock snapped. “Do things like you have such fucked up senses of humor that you find this situation funny? I can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t? Are you saying that my future is on some alien world? Is this your world? Are you going to bring me here?”

The thing did not speak. It only leveled him with a grave sort of gaze. Tendrils rolled off its thin frame in an inky cloak of satin darkness that slid to cover its face in a dark hood.

“Aren’t you going to talk to me, Venom?” Brock asked, getting angrier and more confused by the moment. “You wouldn’t shut up before. Isn’t there something you want to show me?”

A nearly imperceptible inclination of the thing’s hooded head was its only reply. Brock thought he smelled smoke and burning flesh even on this bizarre alien vista. The scent was light, but it was there.

He moved right in front of the thing. He looked up into the hood, seeking to see the face within. “Venom!” he snapped. He demanded.

The impenetrable darkness within the hood filled him with dread. Without thinking he reached for the hood, seeking to draw it away. In response, the creature ghosted back away from him.

Nonplussed, he took another step forward, and reached again. It fled him again, too quick.

They watched one another, he and the thing. Brock’s dread intensified moment for moment until he was awash in a sweaty kind of terrible fear. He was so afraid, suddenly, that he found that his legs trembled beneath him and he could barely stand on them. Just beyond his reach, Venom merely regarded him.

It was this dark regard that was terrifying. It filled him with an uncertain horror to know that beyond that dusky shroud, there were terrible eyes on him, and he could not see them—look into them, understand them.

“Show me whatever it is that you have to show me!” he demanded and reached for the hood again. His trembling legs moved, of their own accord, desperate, in the thing’s direction. He was running before he knew it, Venom ghosting in front of him, just out of reach. Brock intensified the strength of his pursuit without giving any consideration to what he was doing. He was just chasing it over the strange smooth ground beneath his feet, over alien pebbled and stone, through some dark tangerine liquid that made up a puddle that he splashed quickly through—desperate to have it.


	20. Chapter 20

**Chapter 20**

 

The city rose up around them, the human buildings and dwellings rising up and replacing the alien landscape. On moment, Brock was chasing Venom over the alien world and the next he was chasing it through the streets of his own city. They were in the heart of it as it lay before them decked all out for Christmas.

Venom stopped before a group of businessmen standing on a street corner. It pointed a long, skeletal hand at them and Brock stopped to hear their conversation.

“No” said a short bald man, “I don’t know all that much about it. I just know he’s dead. Surely, you passed house on the way here?”

“I did not pass the house this morning, as a matter of fact,” another man said, yawning. “I took another way in this morning. This happened last night, you say? On Christmas? If it was anyone else, I’d say it was terrible news. What has he done with all that money?”

“I don’t know,” the bald man said. “Left it to his company, perhaps? All I know is that he didn’t leave it to me.”

A man with a red face chilled with the cold laughed and joined their conversation. “It’s going to be a piss-poor funeral, that,” he said, “even with all that money. I can’t think of anyone who’d attend. Can you?”

“Not a soul. It would be the charitable thing to do though, to volunteer.”

“Only if they feed me,” the bald man said. “I’d do a lot of things for a free lunch.”

They laughed again. “I’m going to take you seriously,” said the red faced man. “I don’t need the free lunch, but I feel obligated as I’m pretty sure I was his closest friend. We did stop and speak, after all, whenever we met. Good day, Gents!”

Other’s entered and left the conversation. Brock knew these men and looked to Venom for an explanation. “Who died, Venom?”

The creature only glided away from him, and Brock followed. Soon enough, it pointed again. Two people were meeting in the street ahead of them. Brock moved close enough to listen.

“How are you, Monty?” one said.

“How are you, Vince?” replied the other.

“Well, the Devil has claimed his own at last, eh? And in his own way too.”

“So I hear. It’s cold today, isn’t it?

“Not particularly for the Season. Just cold enough for a night of skating, I think. Have a good day, Monty.”

“You too, Vince.”

That was all, and the two men parted. Brock could not understand the importance of these trivial conversations. But everything else the creature had shown him had been purposeful. The acrid stench of fire and scorched flesh lingered in the chill air.

He couldn’t think of whom the poor soul could be who everyone was referring to or what that death had to do with him. He looked for himself in the milling Christmas crowd, because, judging by the time, he should be on the corner. There was a man there, but that man was not him. He didn’t see himself in the milling crowd anywhere, but that wasn’t the most surprising thing in the world as his adventures this night had changed him. He wouldn’t do the same things if he had changed. He might be late in coming to that corner. He might not come to that corner at all.

Quiet, towering and dark, Venom stood beside him with that hand outstretched, finger pointing. And, for the first time since touching Venom, Brock felt cold.

“Venom,” Brock said, and there was a desperate whine in his voice that he did not like. He couldn’t help it though. He missed the sound of that terrible voice. He missed being trapped in the wicked, white light of the things terrible regard. “This dead man, he keeps the same associations that I do…and I am not there on the corner. Maybe I’m at a Christmas party? Do you think so?”

But Venom only pointed, and, after a while, and head down, Brock moved in the direction of that commanding finger.


	21. Chapter 21

**Chapter 21**

 

He walked into the darkness of a scene that made him recoil in dark horror. The room he found himself in was dark and meager, but neat. Pans lay on a table, and those pans were filled with sharp surgical utensils, blackened skin, fat, and brown, watery blood.

There was a bed near the table in this strange, dark, room. The bed was bare and uncontained, built, obviously for function and not comfort. Beneath the ragged sheet draped across it, something lay covered up.

Brock’s blood ran cold. What kind of room was this, he wondered, for no hospital had ever been so dark as this. Was it a hostel then? He nodded to himself. That made sense. This was a hostel, the medical facilities of the destitute. But hadn’t the man that everyone had been talking about been rich? The man he was fairly certain lay stiff and still under the blood stained sheet before him now? Why would a rich man die in a hostel? Hadn’t there been anyone to see to him at all?

He stood there quivering. He couldn’t help it. His body took up the terrible shaking on its own. His heart pumped like a piston and he felt faint. Pale moonlight from the greasy window fell upon the bed, illuminating the form beneath. Unwatched, unwept, and uncared for was this man.

Silent and beside him, Venom pointed toward the head of the corpse beneath the sheet.

Brock shook his head in response to the silent command. This was an order that he could not obey. His legs wouldn’t let him. Frozen, he simply stared at the covered corpse of a man who didn’t have a single man, woman or child to say a kind thing about him. A cat howled from the other side of the greasy window, and he could hear rats gnawing in the walls. It was a room of death.

Terrible. Lonely. Death.

“This is a ghastly place, Venom,” he said, softly. He backed away from the bed and back into the thing. He relished the feel of momentary contact with the alien flesh. His eyes closed with the feel of it. And then, Venom jerked away from him, back toward the shadows—and Brock was cold again. “Let’s be away from here!” he said, whirling on the thing.

Venom pointed, again, to the corpse, the head of the thing. The command to pull back the sheet was easy to read in the curl tip of its clawed finger.

“No!” Brock shouted, tired of its silence. “Let’s do this instead! If there’s anyone, anywhere who feels anything for this poor dead man, take me there!”

And they were gone.

A moment later and they were somewhere else. A mother and her children occupied a room was filled with merciful daylight. The children played, as children would, but the mother seemed anxious. She paced back and forth in the room and kept glancing at the clock.

Soon enough, someone knocked on the door of the house and the woman rushed to answer it. The man on the other side of the door had a careworn, depressed, face, though he was young enough. He sat down to take his dinner by the fire, and she watched him anxiously as he ate. Finally she said, “What news, Mark? Is it good of bad?”

He looked up at her, and he looked embarrassed. His eyes would not meet hers. “It’s bad.”

“Are we ruined?” she whispered, clutching her hands to her breasts.

“There is some hope,” the man said, softly.

“If he relents.  He had his hands in everything. Taking a loan from such a man was a foolish, desperate act. Do you think he’ll relent, Mark?”

“He’s well past relenting. He’s dead.”

The smile that exploded on the woman’s face was a lovely, joyous thing to see. “Dead?”

“As a doorknob,” the man said. “Our loan will transfer to someone else. Anyone else. It will take weeks. And then it won’t matter, we’ll have the money by then, sweet Caroline.”

She leapt for joy and wrapped her arms around her husband, glad that the man in the bed was dead, overjoyed at his demise.

“Someone else,” Brock said, softly, watching them, “Some tenderness for the poor dead bastard.”


	22. Chapter 22

**Chapter 22**

Brock followed Venom through the city streets. He looked everywhere for himself amongst the city’s denizens, but he was nowhere to be found. They entered poor Peter Parker’s house, and all was quiet within—very, very quiet.

Peter sat still as a statue on the couch upon which he slept. There was a book open on his lap but he wasn’t reading it. He was staring toward Aunt Mae’s room, and, from where he stood, Brock could see the cold, empty bed within.

“What am I supposed to do now, Aunt Mae?” Peter asked softly. “First my parents, then dear Uncle Ben, and now you. Who am I supposed to save if I couldn’t save the people that meant the most to me in the world? Maybe I don’t deserve to be a--”

There were tears in Peter’s eyes, but he wiped them away quickly as someone knocked on the door. Bella and her children entered the room. The woman’s arms were laden, again, with food.

The little girl broke away from the small group, ran the short distance to Peter, and threw herself into his lap. “Aunt Mae wouldn’t want us to be sad, Peter,” she said, softly.

He smiled at her, the sudden picture of composure. “I’m not sad,” he assured her. “Why just today I saw Philip Brock and he thinks he can get me a job with his boss. It’s hard work but it pays better than my old job did. Wasn’t that kind of him, keeping us from starving to death, just so?”

“You’re not going to be a reporter anymore, Peter?”

“No,” Peter said with a smile, tossing her lightly in the air and catching her again so that she giggled breathlessly. “Aunt Mae always thought I was smarter than just taking pictures, Philip’s boss, Tony Stark, is a man of science, and if I impress him, I’ll be a man of science too.”

“Mae would be real proud, Peter,” Bella said, softly. “Real proud.”

Peter’s smile faltered a little. “There’s been too much death lately. Both Philip and I agree on that. He was as dejected as I.”

“What’s dejected mean?” the little girl asked curiously.

Peter smiled. “Happy,” he told her, “right, Bella?”

“Right,” Bella replied, walking toward the kitchen. “Why don’t you bring your happy self to dinner before you starve to death, Peter Parker?

Peter got up with the little girl in his arms, tossed her again, and walked her giggling form into the kitchen.

Brock whirled on Venom as the scene dissolved, replaced by another. This was a natural place and somber greenery peaked out from amongst the white, white, snow.

“Mae Parker died?” Brock said, softly. “That’s terrible. Poor Peter.”

He looked around then for Venom had drifted away from him. The thing slid between white snowdrifts just ahead. He followed, doggedly. “Tell me who that was we saw lying dead,” he demanded.

Venom remained silent. Brock could hardly stand that silence. He missed that terrible voice dearly. “I see that we are by my house. Let me see what has become of me!”

He could see just the top of his manor over a copse of trees. It was burned and broken, black from flames.

The scent of fire intensified in Brock’s nostrils suddenly. The hairs there seemed to burn. “Venom, goddammit!” he shouted, and Venom stopped.

And pointed.

The wrought iron gate of the city’s churchyard rose in the near distance. In a second they were within it. The creature pointed again, this time to a solemn and terrible shape that rose up from the ground with many other in somber rows.

“No,” Brock said, softly.

But Venom was relentless. In another second, without Brock moving at all, he found himself closer to the headstone that it pointed at. “Venom,” he begged and tried to reach the black figure, but his feet sunk in the snow like it was, suddenly, quicksand.

He wanted the warmth of it. He wanted to feel its strange skin against his own again. He’d never wanted anything more in his life. He wanted it even more than he didn’t want to see the same on the tombstone that the thing was pointing at.

He could not die, no matter what that tombstone said. If he died, he wouldn’t be with Venom. He stopped chasing it and just stood there in that quicksand snow. He had an idea.

“Hey,” he called out.

Venom paused and turned around. Brock began, quickly, to strip off his clothes. “Pay attention to me, you damned monster!”

“I don’t want to die,” he said. He dropped his shirt in the snow and began working on his pants. “I’ve fucked up a lot and I want to fix it all. I’ll make it all right.”

Silently, Venom pointed at the tombstone again. Brock threw his pants at it. They slapped it in its too skinny chest and were absorbed, greedily, into that inky black flesh.

He took a step toward it and it was easier, just regular snow again. He came upon it, and it did not move away from him this time. He reached out and grasped the hood, drew it back, “Just don’t leave me.”

And the world changed.


	23. Chapter 23

**Chapter 23**

Brock was back in his bedroom. Venom was shrieking, dying. Thick, black, smoke filled the room and the startled thieves watching, indecisive about whether they should run away or rob the house. A hand was reaching for him and Brock grasped it. It was like an explosion detonated within him at the contact. That hand dragged him down into the smoking fiery mess. He was kissed by his own lips and enveloped in a darkness that stroked his cells, his very soul. He was on his feet in the next moment, completely whole for the first time in his life.

He stared at the men who had broken into his house and tried to kill them. He wanted to hate them, but he found that he could not. He wanted to eat them. That horrible hunger consumed him as his body went about the business of repairing itself from the damage the fire had done.

“I’m starving,” Brock told the men who were staring up at him in horror. He extended an arm toward the big man that had started the fire. And that arm kept going and going, sharpening at the tip, spearing him through the stomach in a wash or gore and blood spray that catapulted him back into the hall to smash into the wall there in a puff spray of shattered paint, broken wood, broken bones, and chipped plaster. He shook off that corpse, breaking the rest of its bones in the hot flick of that arm.

One of the men broke away from the clump they’d been standing in—shocked, horrified. He ran for his life, and they knew that this was the one they were going to eat. They barreled through the door, casually breaking the fat man’s neck as they passed, and wrapping the other in a hot, wet tentacle and flinging him out the window, down, down until his neck snapped on the rope of the tentacle that held it tight.

They caught the thin man at the bottom of the stairs, coming at him with incredible strength and maniac speed. The adrenaline rush was delicious. They grabbed him by the shoulders. They dragged him back toward their snapping maw and licked him as he came.

“My new wife wants to let you go,” Venom said to their struggling victim.

The darkness moved and Brock was looking at the man from within the monster. “It’s true. I think you’re disgusting, but I’ve got a--”

“Symbiote,” Venom reminded him, hungrily.

“ _Parasite_ ,” Brock said.

With an indignant roar, Venom bit the man’s head off and swallowed it whole.

It was disgusting.

 

*

 

The next day, Christmas Day, the people of the city were shocked and amazed to see the change in Edward Charles Allan Brock. He greeted everyone he met in the street most kindly and sincerely. He gave gold coins to beggar children in the street. He stopped by the butcher’s and purchased the biggest goose in the store. He stopped by his office and tore up all the loan papers in his safe. He went to a department store and purchased a wealth of gifts and these he took to Philip’s house in order to accept his invitation to attend that night’s Christmas party.

He gave Philip’s lovely Sophia silks and glittering jewels that were only nearly as pretty as she was, while apologizing to her profusely for putting off this pleasant meeting for so long.

“Are you alright, Uncle Brock?” Philip asked, mouth hanging open.

“Merry Christmas,” Brock said, and then leaned in on the younger man, “Do you ever wonder why we can’t treat one another this way every day? I’ve seen the world, Philip, and each country has some special day set aside for human decency and compassion toward one another, but I think Christmas, the feeling associated with it, the kindness inherent in it, should be every day, don’t you?”

He was on his way to Peter’s house next. He had already sent the finest doctor that money could buy and now he was bringing many presents that a young man who was a good reporter, but would make a far better scientist, might need. There were things for Aunt Mae as well because she was going to need them because she was going to live. If something as simple as money could buy her life, then he was going to buy it. There were dolls for the little girl, toys for her brother, and a lovely set of frocks, aprons and oven mitts for Belle—who liked to cook.  

It was Venom that stopped the coach in the shady side of town a few blocks away from Parker’s house. It was Venom who forced him out of that coach and down a dirty back alley. It was Venom who was swirling around him now, the movements of those inky tentacles slow and mesmerizing as they tore off a perfectly good suit—shredded it like paper so that it could slide over and through him. It flipped him around, forced him, naked, to his knees in a puddle of itself and began to violate him.

Brock’s dick got hard like it did when this thing touched him. Heat suffused him and his very cells sang as dark tendrils slid up his ass and down his throat. Darkness swirled underneath him and he stuck his dick in the inky stuff, and it tense around him, tightened around his dick, formed a shaft that he could fuck, and Venom made this sound…

…it was a low, aching sound unlike anything he’d ever heard before.

He fucked it until it whimpered. He fucked it until it cried.

 

*

 

The meeting at Peter’s house turned into a party after they got there. The party went on long into the night and was interrupted by a dark scream of high terror somewhere out in the night. Peter excused himself into the bedroom, and Brock went out the front door.

“Let’s save her, Eddie,” Venom said, enveloped him in darkness and sprung up onto the roof. “Let’s be a hero.”

They found her a few blocks away being menaced by two men in the darkness of an alleyway, but there was already someone else there, someone dressed in tight red with a spider insignia stitched across the chest. He was fast. He covered the men in tight webbing and saved the girl. It was interesting to watch, but Brock was sorely disappointed in not being able to play the hero.

“Hey Ugly,” the Spider Man called out, mockingly.

“ _That’s my ex_ ,” Venom said, bitterly.

Brock didn’t like that. He launched himself at the would-be rival with a mighty roar and the other rushed to meet him.

“ _It’s_ Parker,” Venom whispered.

Brock didn’t care.

They fought. And it was great.

It was the best Christmas ever.

 

**The End**


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